The chant that brought Poh Ling Yeow to tears: MasterChef Australia star is overwhelmed as the crowd gets behind her during a stressful challenge
Poh Ling Yeow returned to MasterChef to prove she is worthy of redemption more than a decade after placing runner-up in the first season.
And the fan favourite held back tears on Monday’s episode when an excited crowd chanted just for her during a stressful challenge.
‘I’m getting really overwhelmed,’ Poh, 47, said as she became emotional over the kind gesture.
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The chant that brought Poh to tears: MasterChef Australia’s Poh Ling Yeow was overwhelmed when the crowd got behind her during a stressful challenge on Monday’s episode
The crowd cheered and shouted ‘Poh, Poh, Poh’, when the celebrity chef entered the cooking arena.
With all eyes on her, Poh was taken back by the attention and needed to be comforted by her co-stars.
‘It makes me really think of how long this journey of MasterChef has been going for. And how much of an impact this show has made on the Australian psyche, and how much they love it and how much they love us,’ she said.
‘It’s just a really lovely feeling.’
‘It’s just a really lovely feeling’: The crowd cheered and shouted ‘Poh, Poh, Poh’, when the celebrity chef entered the cooking arena with her co-stars
Noisy! Monday’s episode of MasterChef Australia: Back to Win saw the greatest off-site challenge in the show’s history. The contestants filed into a warehouse space to be greeted by a screaming and clapping crowd of fans
Poh was tasked with cooking culurgiones – a Sardinian potato dumpling – during a group challenge between the teams.
But as she raced against the clock, Poh struggled to finish her dumplings in time, sending many viewers onto Twitter to vent their frustrations.
After starting out ‘confident’, it wasn’t long before Poh was plagued with problems, with the potato filling taking longer to cook than she anticipated.
Five minutes out from the end of the challenge, she realised she didn’t have enough filling to make five dumplings.
‘I have enough filling to do two smallish dumplings. I know they’re not going to be plump and amazing like I thought, but I just can’t serve up one dumpling,’ she said.
Ready, set, cook! Poh was tasked with cooking culurgiones – a Sardinian potato dumpling – during a group challenge between teams
In between the bombastic music and the judges having to shout over the immense roar of the crowd, some viewers said they had switched off or muted the program because they couldn’t handle the noise.
The first half of the show was filmed before coronavirus anti-crowd rules came into effect, but the second half of the season won’t include challenges like this.
MasterChef Australia continues Tuesday at 7.30pm on Channel 10
Tune in: MasterChef Australia continues Tuesday at 7.30pm on Channel Ten
